1. Field
Embodiments relate to a smell dilution unit for diluting a smell generated during printing and an electrophotographic image forming apparatus including the smell dilution unit.
2. Description of the Related Art
Image forming apparatuses using electrophotography are apparatuses for forming images by receiving a digital image signal, forming an electrostatic latent image on a photosensitive medium by using an exposure unit such as a laser scanning unit, developing the electrostatic latent image by using a developing agent, transferring the developed image to a recording medium, and applying heat and pressure to fuse the transferred image onto the recording medium.
A color image is formed by disposing in an overlapping manner a plurality of developing cartridges in which four colors of toner (cyan, yellow, magenta, and kara) are respectively stored to pile up the colors of toner.
When printing is performed indoors, a user may feel headache and nausea due to a smell generated during the printing. In this case, the user may perceive the smell as harmful and may hesitate to use an image forming apparatus.
Various methods have been suggested to solve this problem, and objectives of most of the methods are to make a user not clearly perceive the smell rather than to completely remove the smell.
One of the methods includes mixing or adding a smell masking agent with or to toner such that an unpleasant smell is diluted with an odor generated by the smell masking agent during printing, thereby preventing a user from feeling uncomfortable.
However, toner having been transferred to a recording medium and then passed through a fuser is fused onto the recording medium at high temperature and high pressure. At this time, the toner may be decomposed and a harmful smell may be generated due to a by-product. That is, the smell masking agent itself added to the toner in order to remove an unpleasant smell generated during printing additionally generates a harmful smell due to the high temperature and high pressure.